diaresis: no, really every word ends at either a caesura or diaresis by definition; of these the only ones of practical interest are the ones which can show you the 'joins' in homeric verses, i.e. the common starting or ending points of homeric formulae. 2 such points are the caesura and the bucolic diaresis, where you have many formula sets beginning and ending, and you have correption patterns different to all other points in the line.

relationship between caesura and buc diaresis? well, i've noticed from experience that most verses which have a 4th foot caesura also have a bucolic diaresis, just a side point. i'm not sure what kind of relationship there could be between a 3rd foot caesura and the buc diaresis.

for the rest of the questions, if you have 2 possible caesurae in a line, it's not necessarily the case that one is "true" and one is false. the caesura is an explanation by later people of patterns they saw in grk poetry. in that sense identifying the divisions at all is an "artificial" exercise, however in another sense it isn't because, as i said above, it shows you the joins, the starting and ending points, which most often occur due to the way homeric verses were often built out of formulae of particular metrical lengths and positions in the line.

finally you're also right when you say a caesura or diaresis doesn't occur before an enclitic or after ÎºÎ±Î¯: e.g. i don't mark a buc diaresis before Î¼Î¹Î½ in Iliad A 441:

Actually, there's an entire area of study about how the hexameter is put together, where breaks are most likely, where they aren't, etc. Chad has read more about than I have, but I've been looking at it, especially localization[1], a lot recently. I hope to have a summary (with references) ready for Aoidoi, post-redesign.

[1] localization: studies about the habits of words of particular metrical shapes, where they go, where they don't. Some word shapes that you'd think would fit several places in a line may spend up to 80% (or more) of their time in one or two preferred slots.

chad wrote:diaresis: no, really every word ends at either a caesura or diaresis by definition; of these the only ones of practical interest are the ones which can show you the 'joins' in homeric verses, i.e. the common starting or ending points of homeric formulae. 2 such points are the caesura and the bucolic diaresis, where you have many formula sets beginning and ending, and you have correption patterns different to all other points in the line.

I'll have to start paying more attention to where correption occurs. I notice in your intro to the Il.B scansion you mention that it occurs more often in lines of speech than in narrative lines. Is there some indication (either because of this or something else) that the language in epic speech is notably different than that of narrative?

You also mention that it occurs far more often before the fem.caesura and the buc.diaresis. Does this suggest anything about actual pauses in the verse, or is it just because joining phrases and formulae would probably result in hiatus more often than within the carefully crafted (traditional) phrases?

And about hiatus: Does correption eliminate hiatus? or does it result in what Pharr calls "weak hiatus"? I'm not sure that I'm reading it correctly. And why are successive vowels between words treated differently than within a word (or are they)?

annis wrote:Actually, there's an entire area of study about how the hexameter is put together, where breaks are most likely, where they aren't, etc. Chad has read more about than I have, but I've been looking at it, especially localization[1], a lot recently. I hope to have a summary (with references) ready for Aoidoi, post-redesign.

I've been trying to work through some of the literature on this. I read through some of Parry's papers a while ago, and now I have Hainsworths' book from the library on the flexibility of the Homeric formula, although I'm browsing it more than studying it. This was what sparked my interested in the buc.diar., the position after which seems to be very important for the study of localization.

Thanks for all the help! I did some more reading this weekend, and I think I'm starting to get a much better idea about what exactly a caesura is.

chad wrote:the point about correption occurring more often in speech than in poetry suggested to Kelly 1990 that epic poetry was a development from a proto-epic genre where the speeches were in verse and the narrative was in prose, which as a genre has parallels in other ancient IE family members apparently.

That's really interesting; I'm going to look into it sometime. But does anybody know if this practice actually occurs? or just mentioned somewhere? or just theorized? I'm under the impression that Sanskrit doesn't do this, although perhaps it also shows traces of the idea.

hi, well Kelly 1990 gives some e.g.s at pages 65-66. irish epic tradition apparently uses this (kelly cites dillon), and kelly also cites a link between the rigveda verse and later vedic prose forms.

is this correct, i've got no idea. in these books, i'm not really interested in the speculations (like this one) made by the authors on the basis of their data of metrical patterns and localisation; the data itself is just a few pages and is the really useful part.